As Fall 2019 fades, we want to reflect on a semester of what CWS has been up to:.
CWS Administrative Team Update:
We are pleased to announce Bri Lafond as incoming CWS Assistant Director. Bri is a PhD student in English/Writing Studies, and we look forward to the contributions she will make as AD. We want to thank Bruce Kovanen, who has served as AD for three semesters and will be a WAM instructor next semester. Logan Middleton will return as AD and Paul Prior will continue as CWS Director.
We’re hard at work planning for next semester and beyond. If you have comments or suggestions for programming, please let Logan Middleton (lpmiddl2@illinois.edu) or Bri Lafond (blafond2@illinois.edu) know. In the meantime, be sure to keep an eye out for announcements on our Facebook and Twitter pages and on our listservs.
Ongoing Initiatives
Fall Symposium: Our fall symposium, titled Race, Translanguaging, and Language Ideologies Across the Lifespan, welcomed Dr. Laura Gonzales (University of Florida) and Dr. Ramón Antonio Martínez (Stanford University) to campus as keynote speakers. Their talks—“Technological innovation through Language and Community Engagement” and “Recognizing (and Not Recognizing) the Richness of Children’s Translingual Repertoires: A Raciolinguistic Perspective on Translanguaging and Racialized Students”—were engaging and impactful.
Drs. Gonzales and Martinez also offered a methodological workshop with graduate students in which participants shared excerpts of their research data from their works-in-progress.
CWS Brownbags: Our Fall 2019 brownbags were well attended and we are grateful for the continued engagement of presenters and participants. Our topics included:
- Our biannual “Concentration in Writing Studies: Informational Session” led by Dr. Paul Prior;
- “Women and Dictionary Making: Gender, Genre, and English Language Lexicography” led by Dr. Lindsay Rose Russell;
- Writing Centers and Online Tutoring, led by Dr. Carolyn Wisniewski, María Carvajal Regidor, Evin Groundwater, and Allison Kranek;
- “Writing Across Engineering,” led by Dr. Julie Zilles, Megan Mericle, and Bruce Kovanen
Brownbags continue to be a critical space for sustaining community, sharing scholarship and supporting professional development. We’re looking forward to announcing Spring 2020’s lineup of brownbags in the next month, so stay tuned!
Transdisciplinary Writing Studies Conference and CFP List: CWS ADs were hard at work this term composing this conference and CFP list, intended to be used as a field-wide resource. The conferences and annual meetings presented in this document stretch across multiple disciplines and might be of interest not only to the CWS community but to scholars, researchers, and teachers working in adjacent fields and contexts.
Next 20 Years (Part II): Our second “Next 20 Years” event, held on October 30, challenged our community to think boldly and bravely about the future of CWS. Changes in university and departmental structures mean that the future of CWS is uncertain. However, we believe that CWS will expand and continue to grow if our institutional mission can be sustained/transformed. During this meeting, CWS director Paul Prior and CWS assistant directors Bruce Kovanen and Logan Middleton facilitated discussion around developing new partnerships and missions across campus as well as exploring potential re-imaginings of the role, goal, and purpose of the Center.
Writing Across Media: Our Writing Across Media staff meetings this semester focused on better representing WAM to campus stakeholders. Throughout our work this term, we worked toward establishing the groundwork for hosting a Writing Across Media Student Work Showcase for next spring, the likes of which will provide previous and current WAM students an opportunity to present and display their course projects.
In addition, we thank course instructors Bri Lafond and Alexis Kapczynski, who will be cycling out of teaching WAM. Niki Turnipseed and Megan Mericle will be staying on to teach the class, and we welcome Carrie James, PhD student in Curriculum & Instruction, into the WAM fold.
Reading Groups: Members of the CHAT Chat reading group and Social Justice Pedagogy reading group met regularly throughout the semester. These ongoing affinity groups continue to be cherished spaces for critical engagement with theory and practice among colleagues. Members of the CHAT Chat reading group proposed two papers on perezhivanie to the International Society of Cultural-Historical Activity Research (ISCAR). In Social Justice Pedagogy, participants read excerpts from Iris Marion Young’s work, Christina V. Cedillo’s “What Does It Mean to Move?: Race, Disability, and Critical Embodiment Pedagogy,” and workshopped pedagogical and curricular materials for teaching next semester.
If you have an idea for a reading or working group that you would like support in facilitating, feel free to reach out to either of the ADs; you can see some earlier groups here.
WAC/WID: Our Writing Across the Curriculum Seminar for TAs this semester focused on responding to students and their writing in ways that encourage revision and learning.
CWS also has ongoing work with the College of Engineering’s Strategic Instructional Innovation Engineering Writing Project, whose objectives include:
- Improving students’ written communication skills by empowering engineering faculty to effectively and efficiently incorporate or refine writing instruction in their classes, and
- Providing a structure for vertical integration of writing across the Engineering undergraduate curricula.
In addition, CWS continues to work with instructors across disciplines to support effective writing and response practices.
Looking forward, the Center is still working on designing an online resource to revise our campus policy on plagiarism to reflect meaningful, theory-based, and learning-oriented perspectives on writing, authorship and citation. We’re also looking forward to our Spring 2020 WAC seminar, which will be held on January 16 and 17.
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Finally, we really want to thank you—as a part of CWS as a whole—for your continued interest, support and engagement. You help make our community a welcoming and intellectually engaging one!
Happy holidays from the CWS Admin Team,
Paul Prior, Bruce Kovanen, and Logan Middleton
Twitter: @IllinoisCWS
Facebook: WritingStudiesIL
Web: cws.illinois.edu
